General Fuller’s Career-Ending Message for Americans

One of America’s top generals in Afghanistan was fired
last Friday for making “inappropriate public remarks.”

Major General Peter Fuller’s career-destroying offense
was to publicly criticize Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai for saying during
an October 22nd interview with Pakistani news media that that if the
U.S. and Pakistan got into a war, he and Afghanistan would side with Pakistan in
fighting against the United States. The general’s critical comments were made
during an interview Thursday with the left-leaning news websitePolitico.

“Why don’t you just poke me in the eye with a needle?
You’ve got to be kidding me. … I’m sorry, we just gave you $11.6 billion, and
now you’re telling me, ‘I don’t really care?’ ” Fuller
said.

General Fuller also referred to Karzai’s being
“erratic,” expressed hope that Afghanistan’s next leader will be more
“articulate,” said he thought Afghan government leaders are “isolated from
reality” in their expectations of what America should expend in that country,
and said those Afghan leaders “don’t appreciate” the sacrifice that the United
States is making in “blood and treasure” for the people of their
country.

The general could have — but didn’t — mention that
Karzai is forever demanding apologies from us; that he has referred to the U.S.
and other foreign soldiers protecting him and his country as “occupiers;” that
he has publicly threatened to join the Taliban; that he now and then demands our
“immediate” withdrawal; that his is a highly corrupt operation; that he is
scheming to dismantle his country’s constitution to perpetuate himself in power;
that when an October 29th Taliban suicide bombing attack against a
NATO bus in Kabul resulted in the deaths of some thirteen persons, most of them
Americans, Karzai again insulted us by expressed condolences only for the four
who were Afghans; and that it took our leaning on him to extract belated
inclusion of the Americans and others.

The elite media is treating as a fairly big story
General Fuller’s being fired for saying what he said in public. Fair enough.
But what the elite media have been missing and continue to miss — and likely
will keep right on missing — is the bigger story of the bigger picture
here.

Everything General Fuller said that got him fired is
true and needs to be understood by the public and by the media. Bear in mind
that General Fuller, a man who has served our country as a U.S. Army officer for
more than 30 years, was the deputy commander charged with turning Afghan’s
military into an effective fighting force. Knowing this, there is something
lacking in anyone’s sense of patriotism who does not understand and share the
general’s annoyance and frustration about Karzai’s revealing that he would have
no qualms about ordering Afghan soldiers trained by Americans to fight and kill
Americans.

And yet…it is not the place of General
Fuller to presume without authorization to make and conduct U.S. foreign policy.
Clearly he crossed the line. Thus, it is beside the point and matters not one
bit that what he said in public is true and very likely echoes what the superior
officer who fired him and just about every other American military official in
Afghanistan says in private.

We can expect that most of the debate about the firing
of General Fuller will center on the point just made and answered. Big
mistake.

The firing of General Fuller raises a much larger
unanswered question, the question that should have been raised and discussed in
the media all along from the very moment that Hamid Karzai publicly made his
inappropriate, insulting remarks at which General Fuller and every other clear
thinking American rightly takes great offense: what should U.S. leaders say and
do when a foreign leader who owes his country’s freedom, and perhaps even his
own life, to American goodness acts towards America as one would act towards an
enemy?

This bigger question remains unanswered in the public
mind — because the media does not discuss it, does not bother to put the
question to those who should be made to answer it.

What did the president of the United States say or do
about Karzai’s volunteering a promise to fight against us? No one seems to have
any idea. A good guess is that Barack Obama either went golfing or went
fundraising, but that’s only a guess. Did Obama issue a statement expressing
his displeasure and calling upon Karzai to apologize and retract? No. Did the
media ask him why not? No.

What did the Obama administration’s secretary of state
say or do? Hillary Clinton says she promptly called the U.S. ambassador to
Afghanistan and asked him to “go in and figure out what it means,” “it” being
these words uttered by Karzai on Pakistani media: “If fighting starts between
Pakistan and the U.S., we are beside Pakistan.”

Now, most people would take Karzai’s statement as
unequivocally declaring which side he would take in a war between America and
Pakistan — and that it would be against us. Pakistan’s double-dealing
government understood it — and loved it.

But when the president of the United States is so
weak, apparently his secretary of state felt that the best course was to try to
protect him from embarrassing himself yet another time. So Secretary Clinton
covered for Karzai, claiming that his remarks were “taken out of context and
misunderstood.” She gets it that what nowadays passes for journalism is not
likely to run interference against a Democratic administration’s attempt to
hoodwink the American people.

What never got properly reported — because the media
never pressed the matter — is that the Obama State Department contends that
Karzai was merely making the observation that Afghanistan and Pakistan are
nextdoor neighbors, and thus, anyone fleeing Pakistan during a war with the U.S.
would not have to travel far to find welcome refuge. This is not a joke. This
is Obama administration foreign policy in action. Try to imagine how the media
would have played this had Condoleezza Rice resorted to such a cockamamie claim
to spare George W. Bush from having to act in the face of such an affront to
American honor.

Did Karzai ever issue a clarification explaining just
why it is a “misunderstanding” to think he said what he said, that he would side
with Pakistan against us in a war? No. Did the U.S. government demand it of
him? No. Why don’t the U.S. media ask? Can’t they figure how to track down
the ambassador of Afghanistan in Washington? Do you think the Pakistanis
believe that Karzai didn’t mean it when he said he’d side with them against us?
Shouldn’t the elite media ask?

When NATO and American commander in Afghanistan, Gen.John
R. Allen,
explained that he was firing General Peter Fuller because of “inappropriate
public comments,” he may not have caught the irony. General Fuller’s
“inappropriate public comments” were a reaction to Karzai’s wildly
“inappropriate public comments” that insulted our country and are an affront to
any and every American who has aided the people of
Afghanistan.

General Allen also used the word “unfortunate” in his
statement announcing the firing of General Fuller. It is indeed unfortunate for
us all that it was General Fuller rather than President Obama who took Hamid
Karzai to task for insulting America.

A president worthy of respect would have been man
enough to take Karzai to task himself and not permit this sad spectacle of a
long-serving soldier ruining his career for defending American honor when the
president should have but didn’t.

Barack Obama should have picked up the phone and told
Hamid Karzai something like this: “I am alerting you that your life is
suddenly in much greater danger and I urge you to take prompt action to lessen
this increased danger. I expect you to appear on television and radio at the
earliest possible opportunity and announce to the world that not only would you
never side against America in a war but, rather, you would stand with us. Until
you have done this, I have ordered the complete withholding of all personal
safety protection provided by US military that you, your family and your
colleagues have relied upon to keep you alive. The other affected parties are
being informed of this in private. As soon as I learn that you have taken this
step necessary to correct your insult to my country I will restore protection —
but not one moment sooner. If you do not act swiftly, I shall begin working on
drafting eulogy remarks. Have a nice day.”

I wonder — don’t you? — which, if any, of the
Republican candidates for president would handle things in such a firm and
highly persuasive manner.

Don’t you wish that someone in the media — hey, it
could certainly be one of the conservative outlets — would approach Barack
Obama or at least his press secretary plus each of the Republican presidential
contenders, point to the firing of General Fuller, and then raise the big
question this whole issue needs discussed and answered?
Namely:

What should U.S. leaders say and do when a foreign
leader who owes his country’s freedom and perhaps even his own life to American
goodness acts towards America as one would act towards an
enemy?

It would be foolish of the media and the rest of us to
now only focus on whether General Fuller should have taken it upon himself to be
the one to publicly confront Harmed Karzai over his reprehensible insult to
America (already asked and answered).

It’s time to demand that the current president of the
United States and anyone who might be president come 20 January 2013 be asked —
and forced to answer — how they would deal with such an affront to American
honor.

Fred J. Eckert is a former
conservative Republican congressman from New York and twice served as a U.S.
ambassador (to the U.N. and to Fiji) under President Reagan, who called him “a
good friend and valuable advisor.” He’s retired and lives with his wife in
Raleigh, NC.

The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian
Vilar Rodriguez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15, 2008.
It doesn’t take much imagination to extrapolate the message to the rest of
Europe – and possibly to the rest of the world.

REMEMBER AS YOU READ — IT WAS IN A SPANISH PAPER
Date: Tue. 15 January 2008 14:30

ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible
truth – Europe died in Auschwitz . We killed six million Jews and replaced
them with 20 million Muslims.. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought,
creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because
they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.

The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art,
international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These
are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to
ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates
to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious
extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness
to work and support their families with pride.

They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into
the third world, drowning in filth and crime.

Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan
the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.

And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred,
creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and
superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their
talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to
life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed
by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and
theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe ..

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE
BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world’s population. They have
received the following Nobel Prizes:

The Jews are NOT promoting brain-washing children in military training
camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause the maximum number
of deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims. The Jews don’t hijack planes, nor
kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants.
There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church. There is NOT a
single Jew who protests by killing people.

The Jews don’t traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death
to all the Infidels.

Perhaps the world’s Muslims should consider investing more in standard
education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask ‘what can they do for humankind’ before they demand that
humankind respects them.

Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the
Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more
culpability on Israel ‘s part, the following two sentences really say it
all:

‘If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.
If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel ..”
Benjamin Netanyahu

When the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower,
found the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to
be taken and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered
through the camps and even made to bury the dead.

He did this because he said in words to this effect:

‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because
somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that
this never happened.’

Recently, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school
curriculum because it ‘offends’ the Muslim population, which claims it never
occurred. It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent
of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving
in to it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended.
This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the 6 million
Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests
who were ‘murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and
humiliated’ while the German people looked the other way.

Now more than ever, with Iran among others, claiming the Holocaust is ‘a myth,’ it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.

This e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people. Be a link in the
memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.

How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center ‘NEVER
HAPPENED’ because it offends some Muslim in the United States ?

The Worst President Since Before the Civil War

Three years ago, the people of the United States
elected someone who has turned out to be the worst president since the pre-Civil
War era. Barack Obama, whether in economic matters, domestic affairs or
international relations, has been an abject failure and has severely jeopardized
the future of the American people.

This must be the focus and message of those seeking
the Republican presidential nomination, who must not allow themselves to be
focused on demeaning each other and sidetracked by falling for the usual tactics
of the Democrat and media smear machines (epitomized by the latest specious
attack on Herman Cain).

A cursory examination of Obama’s overall record
compared with other presidents reveals someone driven purely by statist
ideology, whose narcissism renders him incapable of change regardless of the
long-term consequences. He does not seem to care what happens to the American
people.

Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt faced far worse
economic conditions when they came into office than were in play when Barack
Obama was elected president. Yet with one a fiscal conservative (Ronald Reagan)
and the other (Franklin Roosevelt) a liberal Democrat, even though they pursued
differing solutions to the dilemmas at hand, neither put the nation squarely and
inexorably on the road to bankruptcy and second-class status.

Barack Obama and his apologists continuously claim
that he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression and that if it
were not for his policies presently in place, matters would be far worse. The
reality is that he did not inherit the worst economy since the 1930s, and his
policies have diminished the standard of living for the majority of
Americans.

The actual factors in play for Barack Obama, Ronald
Reagan, and Franklin Roosevelt when they assumed office were as
follows:

Annual GDP Growth

Unemployment Rate

Inflation

Barack Obama

1.1%

6.7%

1.0%

Ronald Reagan

.1

7.6

12.6

Franklin Roosevelt

-13.0

24.0

-10.0

For the average American, the employment numbers are
the most critical. The following chart is a side by side comparison of the
employment situation for Barack Obama as of Election Day 2008 versus the present
day after three years of his failed policies:

How does Barack Obama compare to some of his
predecessors, who inherited far more severe financial crises? As a further
comparison, while he did not inherit a financial crisis, Jimmy Carter is
included, as he is considered by many the worst president in the post-World War
II era, and many of his policies triggered the massive recession and inflation
inherited by Ronald Reagan.

(Note: The Bureau of Labor Statistics changed its
method of calculating the unemployment rate in 1994. Therefore, in order to
make this a more valid comparison, those workers the BLS considers discouraged
and marginally attached to the labor force and therefore not part of the
unemployment rate calculation have been added below.)

Unemployment Rate as of Election
Day

Unemployment Rate Three years
later

Difference

Barack Obama

7.9%

10.75%

-36%

Ronald Reagan

7.6

8.3

– 9

Jimmy Carter

7.8

5.9

+24

Franklin Roosevelt

24.1

20.1

+17

Barack Obama has chosen uncontrolled and unbridled
government spending, much of it directed to his cronies and fellow ideologues,
as his solution to restarting the economy. This has created an enormous amount
of new debt for the nation with nothing to show for it. One of his
predecessors, Franklin Roosevelt, also chose that route as part of his plan to
rescue the American economy. However, he never took it to the extreme that
Obama has done, with the aid of his allies in the Democratic Party. During
Obama’s tenure, he has added over $4,000 billion ($4 trillion) to the national
debt.

Using the historical actual deficits as a percentage
of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) applied to today’s GDP, the comparison would
be as follows (Herbert Hoover has been added, as he faced the actual massive
collapse of the economy in 1929, the first year of his term.)

The ultimate measure of the success or failure of a
president’s economic policies is the growth of the nation’s Gross Domestic
Product while facing economic headwinds. Here, too, Barack Obama cannot measure
up to those who faced enormous challenges, as his policies and regulatory
obsession have shown him to be an anti-capitalist ideologue with more in common
with the Occupy Wall Street Movement than with the American
people.

Barack Obama

Ronald Reagan

Franklin Roosevelt

Actual inflation adjusted GDP Growth
First Three Years

.3%

13.7%

23.4%

It should be noted that Franklin Roosevelt, after
re-election in 1936, began to pursue more statist policies including demonizing
the rich, higher taxes, passing union-friendly legislation, and additional
government spending, so that by the third year of his second term, the GDP had
contracted by 6.5% and unemployment rose to 19.0% from a low of 14.0% in 1937.
Yet the annual budget deficit as a percent of GDP averaged 3.85% for Roosevelt’s
first two terms as compared to Obama’s 9.23% to date. (http://www.shmoop.com/great-depression/statistics.html)

By any measure, Barack Obama is not only a failure in
his economic policies, but he is, in the aggregate, the worst steward of the
American economy since economic measurements began to be
recorded.

It is little wonder that his re-election strategy is
centered on demonizing his potential opponents and deliberately appealing to the
base nature of the human race — greed and envy — as manifested in his class
warfare rhetoric. This is a record that cannot be defended under any
circumstances, and one the Republicans must focus upon and unceasingly bring it
before the American people.

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MASON, Texas (AP) — On a YouTube clip that has gone viral, brash Texas handgun instructor Crockett Keller defiantly tells Muslims and non-Christian Arabs he won’t teach them how to handle a firearm.

State officials see the ad as possible discrimination, and may revoke Keller’s instructor license.

Tens of thousands of YouTube viewers have watched the $175 ad for Keller’s business in the small community of Mason, which has won him a handful of admirers but that embarrassed locals say misrepresents their community. Muslim groups dismissed the 65-year-old as a bigot.

Among the couple of thousand residents in the Central Texas town, Keller has other reputations.

“He’s a character and likes attention,” said Diane Eames, a jeweler with a downtown shop in Mason’s quaint town square.

Keller has received plenty of attention since his radio spot on a rural country music station in Mason County, about 100 miles east of Austin, went viral on the Internet. Keller said he whipped up the script on his iPad in 10 minutes. The ad quit airing last week.

“If you are a socialist liberal and/or voted for the current campaigner-in-chief, please do not take this class,” Keller says in the ad’s closing seconds, also taking a swipe at President Barack Obama. “You’ve already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision as required under the law. Also, if you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you this class. Once again, with no shame, I am Crockett Keller.”

The Texas Council on American-Islamic Relations called the ad ugly rhetoric undeserving of media attention. Others have called Keller’s phone number from the ad to personally tell him worse, including alleged death threats.

The Texas Department of Public Safety is now investigating whether to revoke or suspend Keller’s license to teach concealed handgun courses.

“Conduct by an instructor that denied service to individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion would place that instructor’s certification by the Department at risk of suspension or revocation,” the department said in a statement.

Inside a remote highway cabin on the edge of the Llano River, where a draped, full-size cannon is parked across from his desk, Keller said he was inspired to make the ad after being “flabbergasted” by a couple neighbors who left the state to campaign for Obama. As for refusing to teach Muslims, Keller described that as an afterthought tacked onto the spot, which he couldn’t remember but said was likely generated from something in the news.

“I got to thinking, ‘Hmm, I’m arming the enemy,’” Keller said.

Of course, even Keller knows that Muslims were unlikely to show up at his door asking to take his $100 course.

Mason County, as Eames described it, is “white bread” — the population was 93 percent Caucasian in the latest census, and all Republican statewide candidates won with at least 70 percent of the vote in 2010. Keller said he wasn’t aware of any Muslims in Mason County, nor could a handful of locals name one.

Eames and Joyce Arnold, a real estate agent, said they worried about the radio spot embarrassing the city. Eames ran what she described as a successful sex-toy business in Mason before opening the jewelry store, and Scott Haupert, co-owner of the Sandstone Cellars Winery, said Mason is more tolerant than Keller’s comments would suggest.

“I voted for Obama and I’ll vote for Obama again,” said Haupert, an avowed Democrat. “If I signed up to take his gun control class, he would not reject me.”

But Keller has also won over some fans. As he spoke with a reporter in his cabin, rancher Clyde McCarley knocked on his door and asked about signing up for a class.

“It’s mighty dadgum interesting to me that some people can say anything they want, and you make a statement and they bring down the house on you,” McCarley said.

Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of the Texas Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the group is watching how the state responds to Keller’s ad and whether the agency revokes his instructor license.

“We try not to give too much credibility to some of these people who do outlandish things,” Carroll said. “But there are some issues that we do have to address.”

Obama Chooses American Defeat

James G.
Wiles

In April, 2007, at the height of
American casualties during the Surge in Iraq, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(D. Nev.) famously announced
“the war is lost.” His remark attracted national headlines – and a big push-back
from Republicans, who, in the wake of the 2006 elections, controlled neither
House of Congress.

An American President – George W.
Bush of Texas – had refused to accept defeat. He changed his military leaders,
launched the Surge and victory followed. And, even though, the Republicans had
lost control of Congress, President Bush’s control of the Executive branch and
the American people’s refusal to accept defeat prevailed over leading Democrats’
desire for American defeat.. It enabled the forces of the Sunni Awakening,
General Petraeus and the coalition’s troops to crush the Iraq
insurgency.

Over a thousand American soldiers died in
Iraq after Leader Reid’s remarkable press conference.

Democrats, like Reid, who’d predicted
defeat, never changed their views. Now, President Barack Obama has just
guaranteed that Senator Reid’s remark will come true. Iraq is not Vietnam and
the Middle East is not Southeast Asia. Yet, the parallels – 36 years after a
Democratic Congress cut off U.S. funding for South Vietnam – are
unsettling.

Once again, a leader of the
Democratic Party has opted for American defeat – after a splendid American field
army has achieved military victory. Former New York Times Baghdad
bureau chief John Burns predicted disaster as a result of Mr. Obama’s decision
on Hugh
Hewitton October 24. “We’ll see” was the most optimism Pulitzer-Prize
winner Dexter
Filkins could muster on his New Yorker blog.

These guys aren’t
conservatives. But, with Michael Yon, these famous war correspondents are
not hopeful about whether America’s sacrifice in Iraq will be
redeemed..

How can Democrats ever be trusted
with America’s national security again?

It’s a simple as
that.

Read Fred and Kimberly Kagan’s
excellent piece this weekend in the new issue of the Weekly
Standard for the post-mortem. The Kagans were part of the intellectual
brain trust behind the Surge – the Surge which President Obama has just thrown
away.

Obama takes risky stance against the rich

With the US economy suffering through its deepest slump since the Great Depression, the Obama administration has designed a political strategy to match, with echoes of the campaign rhetoric deployed by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Throwing out the standard presidential playbook dictating an aspirational pitch to centrist voters, the White House is cementing a high-risk message that strikes firmly at wealth and privilege.

“There is surging sentiment out there among voters that the economy is weighted towards the wealthy,” said a senior White House official. “Public opinion has changed dramatically.”

The White House strategy will make the 2012 election a generational test of the Republican push of the past three decades for cutting taxes, in ways their critics say have been constantly skewed towards the highest earners.

The after-tax income of the wealthiest 1 per cent of US households increased by 275 per cent over the past three decades, compared to an average of 62 per cent for all Americans, the independent Congressional Budget Office reported this week. For the poorest 20 per cent, the growth was only 18 per cent.

The “Occupy Wall Street” protests that are spreading raggedly across the US and the world have thrown a spotlight on mounting popular anger at economic stagnation and income inequality.

But the factors driving the White House go further, to their inability to strike any substantive deals on their terms with congressional Republicans emboldened by their smashing victory in last November’s mid-term elections.

The failure of the economic recovery to yield many jobs during its mild upswing of the past two years has also transformed the political calculus for a president facing a perilous re-election battle.

“In normal circumstances, this pitch might be suicidal. But these are not normal circumstances,” said William Galston of the Brookings Institute.

Mr Galston has been reading the speeches of Franklin Roosevelt’s winning campaign for the 1936 presidential election and finds striking comparisons to the emerging line from Mr Obama.

All sides of politics have been regrouping since the fraught negotiations in August over the country’s borrowing limits that bought the US to the edge of sovereign default.

While Mr Obama was widely depicted as weak in his dealings with Congress, the clash damaged the Republican majority in the House of Representatives even more. Congressional approval ratings are now in single digits.

Although they have offered little fresh on policy, Republicans are tweaking their public message, with the hardline house majority leader, Eric Cantor, recently acknowledging the need to address the rich-poor gap.

Mitt Romney, the frontrunner in the Republican race to challenge Barack Obama in 2012, has taken to saying that he is standing up for the “middle class” because the rich “can look after themselves”.

For the White House, this is just the terrain that it wants to fight on. “The Republicans want to give the average millionaire a $200,000 tax cut, while the middle class is struggling,” said the White House official.

The majority of Republican voters polled by the White House agree with the president, the official added, meaning “they hold a different opinion from their lawmakers and their candidates”.

Mr Obama has been barnstorming the country for the past month, highlighting a jobs package which his aides acknowledge little of which has any chance of passing.

The aim is put Mr Obama back at the centre of the debate after a period in which he seemed marginalised and ineffective, the worst position a sitting president can be in.

“Let’s re-emphasise what powers we have! What we can do on our own! Push the envelope!” William Daley, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview with Politico, the Washington publication.

“What the president wants to turn this into is the proposition that you may hate us, but you will hate these people more,” said a senior Republican congressional official. “We need to make sure we do not allow him to turn this election into an anti-incumbent election.”

Besides the inherent risk in making wealth the central issue in a country which has prided itself on the ability of anyone to get rich, Mr Obama must also surmount a credibility gap in taking on Wall Street.

“He has blown hot and cold on the finance sector, so he is widely regarded as having fallen between two stools,” said Mr Galston.

In the White House, there is no doubt that it is entering the election year with its back against the wall.

Who is Barack Obama?

There are so many things the public does not know
about the man who sits in the White House. Who is Barack Obama? In my search
to find out the answers I embarked on a journey that has lasted three years and
counting — and nearly made my head explode.

As usual, when Obama is the subject, Americans can’t
count on the progressives in the Corporate Mainstream Media (CMM) for much
help. So, what’s one to do? The foreign press proved helpful. Therefore,
gleaned from the foreign press: a few stories which didn’t rate any coverage
from the U.S. CMM.

In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama went on a mission
to Russia with Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN). The newly-minted U.S. senator was
invited to be part of a Russian fact-finding tour that inspected a nuclear
weapons site in Perm, Siberia. The base Lugar and Obama visited was where
mobile launch missiles were being destroyed under the Cooperative Threat
Reduction program (CTR), which also went by the name of the Nunn-Lugar
program.

What happened next — after the inspections were over
— was at the time reported by several foreign news sources but was never
reported in the USA by the CMM. The Russians detained Obama and Lugar for three
hours at the airport, demanding to examine both Obama’s and Lugar’s passports
and search their plane. Some sources reported that the Russians accused Barack
Obama of being a spy.

But wait — there’s more!

According to an Italian source, the Russians did not
accuse Obama of being an American spy; they accused him of being a spy for the
British! The report went on to say that the incident ended up involving the
White House, the U.S. State Department, and military officials, along with their
counterparts in Moscow.

Strangely enough, an official report from Lugar’s
office about the trip never mentioned the incident. Neither did Barack Obama in
2008 when he was desperate to exhibit some foreign policy
chops.

One other oddity: in the fall of 2008, Obama admitted
on his Fightthesmears.com site that he had held dual citizenship with both the
United States and Great Britain (the site explained that this was due to Barack
Obama, Sr. being a foreign national) until 1982. Did the Russians know
something about Obama’s citizenship in 2005 that ordinary Americans don’t know
in 2011?

Another story no one has seen fit to ask about:
Obama’s Most Excellent Pakistani Adventure.

In the summer of 1981, 20-year-old Barack Obama
embarked on a two-week trip to Pakistan. At least what little reporting that
has been done claimed the length of the trip was two weeks. The only proof that
the trip didn’t turn into a longer stay is that we (supposedly) have records
which show that Barack Obama enrolled at Columbia University later that same
summer. Of course, the public hasn’t seen those records, but that’s what we’ve
been told. Anyone in doubt will be directed to Obama’s autobiography,Dreams from My Father.

Obama clearly gave the impression in DFMF that he was
this penniless, somewhat confused young man, in search of an identity. Obama
makes sure readers don’t miss the point by writing that he was forced to wear
“thrift store clothing” during this time. Yet he somehow managed to find the
cash to finance a two-week trip to Pakistan.

Which he never wrote about. Which in itself is odd:
here’s a guy who wrote two autobiographies that explored events real, imagined,
and totally fictional that supposedly forged the modern-day Barack Obama from
humble beginnings. That’s according to the Obama NarrativeTM —
which gets most of its facts from Dreams from My
Father.

Not only did a poor, nearly destitute Obama manage to
afford the trip to Pakistan, but once there he somehow financed two weeks in the
Lahore Hilton International. In addition, Obama was introduced to the future
prime minister and president of Pakistan — and went bird-hunting with him.
Which the prime minister mentioned in the Pakistani press in 2008. There’s so
much more, including one question the CMM never asked Obama: who arranged all of
this? For a 20-year-old nobody.

Another curious piece to the queer Obama puzzle is the
connection — which hasn’t been made in the CMM (attention, Fox News!) —
between illegal foreign contributions to the Obama campaign and subsequent
billions in Stimulus money to foreign companies and banks. During and after the
2008 election, accusations of illegal foreign contributions — which flowed into
the Obama campaign when credit card safeguards were disabled on the campaign’s
website — were documented in the conservative press and
elsewhere.

Who were these mysterious donors, and in what
countries did they live? Unfortunately, due to the chicanery of Team Obama, we
may never know. Fast-forward to 2009. Obama’s multi-billion-dollar Stimulus is
rushed through Congress, and billions of dollars in Stimulus money are doled out
to foreign companies and banks. Finland, China, Brazil, and India are just a
few of the beneficiaries of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars. Might these have
been payoffs for those shady, unknown donations?

Bill Clinton was the first president to benefit from a
foreign spoils system, but Barack Obama has made Clinton look like an
amateur.

One more coincidence in shady fundraising. The lady
involved with Obama’s fundraising in the Caribbean? None other than Vera Baker,
who packed up and hurried left the country after the National Enquirer
started exploring a possible tryst between her and Obama in a Washington
hotel.

Barack Obama can only hope that ObamaCare covers
“extreme stress” — because whoever on his staff is responsible for keeping
track of all of the weird stuff in the president’s life is definitely a
candidate for burnout.

One final item involves that most elusive of
documents: Obama’s long-lost long-form birth certificate.

A Chicago-area activist, Sherman Skolnick, writing for
a radio show/website (now defunct) by the name of Cloak and Dagger uncorked this
headline on his readers. It referred to another story he’d written in 2005 —
three years before anyone in the media coined the term “birther” to tamp down
curiosity about our 44th president’s past. (All-caps headline in the
original story.)